Running to Stay in Place
For several weeks now, I’ve been feeling better and seeing improvements. I was lulled into a false sense of security. Apply a little stress and back comes the pain with all of its friends.
The pain in my side used to feel like my appendix was about to burst out through my belly. As time has passed, it has settled into two other presentations: either a mild appendix attack or the feeling of the mouth of an unseen monster clamping down on my entire right side- from my lower ribs to my hip bone. The pain itself has changed character as well. It used to be debilitating. Now, it is more a dull ache which slowly sucks all of the strength from my body.
As if the pain weren’t enough, I also get fuzzy in the head. I can’t think straight or focus. I can’t concentrate.
I meet a little friend along the way...
We’ve kept up with the running, trying to get me into a condition which will allow us to increase the number of days or mileage.
I can’t believe this is the same body I had a year and a half ago. The running is difficult, horrible at times. I drag myself a mile and I’m so tired that I can’t imagine I’ll be able to make it back home. I used to be able to run ten, twelve miles. It was hot and hard work, but I felt like I could do it. Now, I feel like that must have been a dream. It was something I imagined very vividly and tricked myself into believing really happened.
The farmers are finally getting things done...
The good news in all of this? I have stopped experiencing the five to ten pound fluctuations in weight that plagued me all winter. I don’t mean I’d fully gain that weight. I would weigh myself several times a day to try to better understand the process of what my body was doing: my weight would increase ten pounds over eight or ten hours, then I’d lose half or all of it by morning. It wouldn’t happen every day, but it happened most days.
When I quit wheat to try to beat down the bad reactions I’d get that the doctors want to call Irritable Bowel, I GAINED FIFTEEN POUNDS. How can a person cut out all cake, donuts, bread, and associated calories from icing, butter, and fixins and GAIN FIFTEEN POUNDS??!!
My perception of what happened is that I wasn’t absorbing a lot of the nutrition I was consuming. I was actually vitamin deficient a year ago. While I haven’t had all of the ongoing, obvious symptoms I had at that time, I haven’t felt right or been able to perform well since I got sick. I have reclaimed much of my health, but I don’t feel the same. I don’t have the pep I used to, the urge to get out there, to run and feel free. I’m faking it to make it, hoping that my energy will return eventually. Hoping the exercise will help me shape up what’s left. Happily, I have come down from heights of 180lbs to a weight finally dipping below 170 for the first time in months and a fluctuation more like a pound or two per day.
I don’t see weight as important by itself, but it affects everything I do. I am carrying a heavier load when I run. My style of movement changes. My clothes are tight and uncomfortable. I kind of like my little belly, except when I’m dragging it around the course and the heat is relentless. Oh, and when I can feel my hind end moving around like it isn’t attached to the rest of me. I’ve seen it. I KNOW it isn’t that big, but it feels like it has declared its independence back there. Those are the worst days.
When it comes to yoga, I haven’t yet developed the upper body strength to support the weight I carry, which is another major roadblock and frustration, another reason I’d like to keep seeing numbers drop away.
Thankfully, we’ve kept up with meditation. Meditation and running and I have all gone down the same path together, over and over. Both were INCREDIBLY uncomfortable at first. Did I say uncomfortable? I mean EXCRUCIATINGLY PAINFUL. I used to have to lie down to finish a twenty minute meditation session because my back (from bad posture and scoliosis) ached so badly that I couldn’t take it any longer. Now I can sit for thirty minutes with an increasingly similar pain load to that of my partner- tolerable and normal. I have to remember this because, like with running, if I quit…if I get lazy…I have to begin again. And beginning from the beginning is overwhelmingly awful, almost not worth it. Definitely not worth contemplating. It is easier to commit to the routine every day for the rest of my life than to have to start over.
My hair is getting long. Growing it also takes me far more time than it does other people. Some can train for a marathon in sixteen weeks. I need six years. Some get half an inch, an inch of hair a month. Mine has taken a year to reach my jaw. Again I can blame the illness in part, but my hair has always been slow. Now that it is long and the outside temperature is increasing, I am desperate to shave my head again. I don’t want hair. Millimeters of hair, but no more. Yet I may have to seek employment here in tiny town and with the economy this bad, I can’t give a potential employer any more reason to look past me than already exists.